US elections and Koreans

By Choi Sung-jin

With the first of three debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump over now, the U.S. presidential elections are in their final stage.

Few can yet tell for sure which of the two candidates will be the 45th president of the United States 41 days from now. Elections in many countries have long become the process to select the least bad. However, it is more pitiable than embarrassing to see the polls to pick arguably the world’s most powerful person reduced to a mudslinging battle between a secretive, off-putting established politician and a nonsensical, megalomaniac political novice.

If all this would be happening in some banana republic, we may be able to laugh it away as a good diversion. Whether they like it or not, however, the winner will exert not a small influence on the lives of not only Americans but also a good number of people in the rest of the world.

Few people might be more keenly aware of that than Koreans, south and north.

Not all may agree on this but had Al Gore, not George W. Bush, become the 43rd U.S. president and taken up where Bill Clinton left off, the North Korean nuclear crisis might have ended more than a decade ago.

The incumbent American president, Barack Obama, is a likable and respectable leader in more than a few ways, improving the lives of many Americans and solving two diplomatic conundrums of Iran and Cuba. It is regrettable that we cannot say the same about Obama’s two foreign missions that remain unaccomplished ― Syria and North Korea.

Obama’s “strategic patience” with North Korea is but a different name for arrogant neglect and ceaseless sanctions, which former Foreign Minister Song Min-soon aptly described as the “diplomatic means of the lazy” in his recent paper. The 44th U.S. president and his two South Korean counterparts ― Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye ― will likely go down in history as leaders who helped the isolated socialist regime realize its long-cherished goal of becoming a nuclear power, whether others recognize it or not.

That Obama has failed in dealing with Pyongyang and its nuclear armament is seen in recent analyses of U.S. experts. Joel S. Wit, a senior fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University and founder of its North Korea website, 38North, called for the next U.S. leader to start with carrots, in the form of addressing the North’s security concerns and motivating Kim Jong-un’s desire to improve his nation’s economy, to denuclearize the North. “The first hundred days will be critical for the next American president,” he said. “If a window is open to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, it may not stay open for long.”

Two other U.S. experts ― Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia ― made similar proposals at a recent forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is clear that the next president will have to sharpen Pyongyang’s choice: offer greater benefits for cooperation and promise greater costs for continued defiance,” they said. More specifically, the two recommended the incoming administration approaches the North Korean threat as a “front-burner issue” for the U.S. and China, and “offers new and genuine incentives” for North Korea to participate in substantive talks, while increasing economic sanctions and securing its interests and those of its allies.

Nowhere in their proposals is the “nothing-but-sanctions” strategy as pursued by the incumbent administrations in Seoul and Washington. Conservatives here ― officials in Cheong Wa Dae and the ruling party as well as some media outlets ― are going to great length to make the “preemptive surgical strike” by the U.S. appear as one of Washington’s major options while it should be the last choice, or no choice at all. Israel may be the only country that bombed suspected nuclear facilities in Syria nearly a decade ago but no other country has done so since. And the situation is completely different between the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula, and between 2007 and 2017, for their risks can hardly be compared.

Even William Perry, Bill Clinton’s defense minister who proposed a surgical strike against the North in 1994, is now calling for lowering the threshold for the North’s return to the dialogue table by targeting the freeze of nuclear programs first before moving toward eventual denuclearization.

Major players in Northeast Asia are making brisk diplomatic moves. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a summit recently. Abe will also invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to Japan in December. China wants to drive a wedge, however thin that may be, in the U.S.-Japan alliance while the U.S.-backed Tokyo is vying with Beijing over East Asian hegemony. Putin seems ready to give parts of the Kurile Islands back to Japan. All these diplomatic moves are aimed at one thing: taking the more advantageous diplomatic position before the next U.S. president completes forming her or his national security and foreign policy lineup. So is the North’s frantic nuclear progress.

I can’t help but wonder what President Park and her diplomatic aides are doing now except for racking their brains to step up sanctions that have proved more laborious than useful.

Again, it is too early to tell who would occupy the White House next January. Believing in the strong tradition of American democracy and the intelligence of U.S. voters, I cautiously guess Hillary Clinton will have better chances. If Donald Trump wins, not just Korea but the rest of the world may have to rethink their U.S. strategy. If Clinton prevails, one cannot rule out the possibility that she might follow not her predecessor but her husband on North Korea.

What will Park and Cheong Wa Dae do then ― beg Washington to stay put in the current stance or hurriedly follow the new U.S. policy?

This is why I hope Korean voters, too, will exercise more intelligence and restore their hard-won democracy for the first time in a decade in December next year.

Choi Sung-jin is The Korea Times’ senior writer. Contact him at choisj@ktimes.com.